Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs (12 page)

The cat at my heels was just insurance. Somewhat wimpy insurance, judging from the cowering crouch, but I assured myself that
once the bat had stopped, it would look to the cat like what it looked to me—a flying mouse. The cat has never been out of
the house and mice have never been in the house, but I trusted fervently that instincts would burst into play at the appropriate
moment.

I swung my tennis racket. I caught a solid draft of sheer air, nearly knocking myself off balance, while the bat circled around
and swooped just over my head.

I waited, muscles tensed for action, instincts honed, my heart pounding with the lust to kill: I swung again, nearly decapitated
the cat, drove my own knee forcefully into the trash can as I stumbled forward, and I cursed myself for every tennis lesson
I never took.

On the third swing I knocked the bat out of the air onto the ground, where it twitched twice, attached itself to the grid
of my tennis racket and began crawling up the handle. Swiftly, possibly shrieking (for only the second time in my life), I
scraped the offending creature into the trash can, where it hung upside down, still glued to the racket. All three of us thundered
down the stairs to the front door where a passionate discussion ensued concerning who can go outside and who cannot. In the
meantime, the bat was shaking his battered little head and beginning to stir. The cat would not give up: he would go outside
and oversee the release of the bat, or no one would go outside. He glued his back to the door, his paws spread, nailed against
the door like a tiny hairy Jesus figure.

I explained that if he had been a proper cat, he would have caught the bat, eaten it and I would never have had to deal with
the situation at all.

He spoke to me about the lure of the wild life, the faint perfume of wanton females in the wind, the sheer testosterone of
hunting and killing his own food.

I set the trash can on the floor, its inmate twitching erratically against its mesh caging.

“Okay, so perhaps not,” huffed the cat. He flicked his tail at me and stalked with great dignity into the kitchen.

I carried the bat outside and released him.

Or, at least I tried.

I waved him toward freedom.

The bat remained glued to the tennis racket.

I waited for the scent of freedom to call him.

He wrapped his wings around his head and pretended to be dead.

To the bat I said, “Give me back my tennis racket.” For, having used this racket to play one game of tennis in the thirteen
years it had hung in my basement stairway, I was loath to leave it outside, unattended, in the wind and the weather to warp
and perhaps be destroyed.

“Get off, get off,” I wailed, and began dancing the hopping, puppering whines of the terminally mature.

The cat poked his head through the curtains to see what I was up to, and then went away.

I scraped the bat off my tennis racket against the stone flower box on my front porch not unlike the way one would remove
peanut butter from a knife blade.

“Die there, then,” I tossed as my parting shot.

The bat, batted and bewildered, cat-threatened and smashed and trashed—and, very likely, hungry—gathered his tiny bat wings
up, shook them off, staggered a few steps down the flower box, then gathered himself together and flew unsteadily off into
the sunset.

I suspect he warned his friends.

Fear the mighty dyke that lives in that house,
he told them all.
That woman has a shriek that will foul up your radar for days.

I
DO LOVE PRESENTS
and there is a special place in my heart for Christmas, but as a child my favorite—all-time, hands-down
favorite
—holiday was Easter. When we were very young all three of us girls were made brand-new Easter dresses, a tradition that dwindled
down gradually as it became clear we never went anywhere to wear them, and even clearer that—except for that doll-loving sissy,
the Wee One—none of us even liked dresses all that much. However, the new dresses took care of that perpetual gift-giving
foolery, clothes. I was never deeply enamored of the idea of getting clothes as a gift. A “gift,” to me, was something wonderful
and exciting and new and especially mine. It seemed a given, to me, even at an early age, that one way or another we would
get clothes: to wrap them up in pretty paper and put a ribbon on them seemed to me to be cheating. But by Easter we had already
gotten the clothes, so there was not much danger of rushing downstairs in the morning and finding our baskets full of underwear
or more frilly little dresses to wear to school.

No, our baskets would be full of candy.

Chocolate.

I loved chocolate.

There may never have been a child born who loved chocolate more than I did.

Every Easter, in my basket—dead center in my basket—would be a big, molded something made of pure milk chocolate.

Solid chocolate.

Rabbits made of chocolate, most often.

The Easter I was six, the molded milk chocolate in my basket was a chicken.

I was ecstatic. It was a very large chicken, by small child standards, and therefore it was a great deal of chocolate. It
looked so good I began drooling the moment I saw it. I was overwhelmed by chocolate lust.

Even as an adult I do not have a great deal of restraint when it comes to chocolate. Delayed gratification has never been
a strong goal for me. As a child I had almost no restraint. Every year my mother gave me a huge basket full of Easter candy,
and every year my mother took it away from me again at least by noon because I saw no reason to have a huge basket full of
Easter candy unless I could sit right down on the floor and eat the whole thing. I do not have a “full” button that lights
up and tells me to quit eating. I do not have an “enough” button that ever lights up for anything. As a child or an adult,
I can literally eat until whatever I am eating is gone. I may be uncomfortable later, but at the time there is nothing to
warn me of the coming consequences.

As a child I could not bring myself to believe there could be any bad consequences from eating anything so good as chocolate.

I was, however, extraordinarily proud of my chocolate chicken, and I said to my mother, “I’m going to take this over and show
it to my Gramma Peck.”

I had a mission.

It was a mission with a flaw, but a mission nonetheless.

So I did not eat my chicken while we were all piling into the car, because I was taking it to my Gramma Peck to show it to
her.

I did not eat my chicken during the six miles around Randall Lake, around Swan’s Curve, or through the farmlands before and
after Hodunk. We turned on Stancer Road and I did not eat my chicken as we passed the millpond and drove by the Electric City
Mill.

But somewhere between the Electric City Mill and the corner of Stancer and Adolf Roads someone bit the head off my chicken.

I was horrified.

All that work, all that restraint, all that suffering and self-control … all for nothing.

I had nothing to show my grandmother but a headless chicken.

A chicken decapitated by my own greed.

I began sobbing hysterically.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” my mother checked from the front seat.

Holding up the evidence of my moral failure, I sobbed, “I bit the head off my chicken.”

There are those cherished moments in life when parents are reminded of the simple truths of childhood. This was apparently
not one of those moments. “Oh, for Chrissake,” my mother said supportively and turned back to face the front.

So sobbing, huge tears running off my cheeks, I clamored into my grandmother’s house, held up my headless chicken, and confessed,
“IwantedtoshowyoumychickenbutIatetheheadoff
(hic)
…”

My grandmother said, “Was it good?”

And indeed it was.

T
HE SUMMER
I
MET
my Beloved, she took a month off from life and went to Alaska, where she and two friends paddled kayaks around Prince William
Sound.

The summer I met my Beloved, I took a day off work alleging I was ill and sat on the couch eating junk food and watching ’70s
cop-show reruns on TV.

We have never been a perfect match.

The following summer my Beloved bought a kayak and a 20-speed mountain bike. Every day I would talk to her on the phone and
every day she would tell me where she rode that morning before work. Every day I would share with her that I dragged myself
out of bed and into the shower, threw on some clothes and once again made it to work without actually, technically being late.
It occurred to me, sometime during that second summer, that my Beloved wakes up, ready to move and talk and function—nearly
ready to sing—in the wee wee hours of the morn. Before the worms have had their chance to turn. Before the early birds have
begun thinking about their breakfast. And she would then don her biking gear and take off for adventure and discovery and
… pleasure.

This led, of course, to our first fight, which had something to do with distance. She told me one morning that she had ridden
about five miles that day to a particular dam and back. Now, according to the odometer on my truck, when I reached that dam
I was twelve miles from her house. One way. This lent new and dark meanings to such enticements as, “Oh, come on—we’ll just
go for a short ride.” In my biking prime, practicing faithfully, going to the gym religiously, I had worked myself into such
a state of fitness that I could ride my bike twenty-five miles in one day before turning scarlet, wilting like old lettuce
and needing three to six hours of sleep. This meant, of course, that a “short” ride with my Beloved was a mere 35–50 miles
round-trip. A mere teasing of the biking muscles. A “warmup,” as my sports physiologist/sadist/torturist might say.

I recalled for my Beloved my favorite bike ride—it may have been the last—which took place in mid-September, during the blooming
of some unseen and undiagnosed allergen, which sucks the oxygen from my asthma and leaves me huffing and puffing in the dust.
They SAID the ride was 25 miles. I carry an odometer on my bike for just such misrepresentations. I rode along with a friend
for 25 miles, stopping to gasp and wheeze and apologize every mile or so, until at one point we abandoned our bikes on the
edge of a particularly scenic hay field and planned my funeral. We rode 25.5 miles. We rode 25.75 miles. One of our beginning-of-the-ride
companions drove past to encourage us and tell us breezily that the ride had bored her so she had taken the 40-mile route.
I mentioned that—according to my bike—I had already gone 25 miles—which was all I had signed up for—and the finish line was
not visible to my naked eyes.

“Oh, no, it’s about five miles up,” our friend said cheerfully, “and that last two miles is a killer—wind, you know …”

I said, “So I have already ridden twenty-five miles, and they lied about the length.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said blithely.

I slammed that bike on the carrier on the back of her Jeep and jumped into the front seat.

“I guess she’s done,” Blithe Spirit observed.

I grew up on the water. The song of a red-winged blackbird calls home to me. I dislike canoes because they’re tipsy and with
my compromised sense of balance they lack that feeling of security that the living room couch provides, but kayaks are lower
in the water. You can actually touch the water, which has long been a bitter complaint I’ve held against other boats. Were
you floating leisurely down a river in a kayak and were you attacked by a tree, you could reach up and push the offending
foliage aside without guaranteeing you and your partner would be touching the water within the second.
^*
And in kayaks there
is no “partner.” No one behind you in the boat, shifting and bobbling about, shouting orders about the “other paddle” or “your
other right.”

For a long time I allowed friends to convince me canoeing down the Pere Marquette River near Baldwin was fun. I became something
of a legend for my skill and prowess in a canoe. My friend Bob admiringly admitted he has never heard anyone shriek so loudly
or so long over so little. He has told many a fond tale of our adventures, and he has assured me with great affection that
we will remain friends forever as long as I never crawl into his canoe again. Not that Bob is in any great danger of sneak
attacks.

In the interest of togetherness, sharing and mutual water love this spring I bought my own kayak. My Beloved and I took it
home. Stored it in my Beloved’s shed next to hers. From time to time we would go out and admire it. Never one to rest when
there is more to be done, my Beloved insisted we actually take them out in the water.

So I launched my new boat.

I put my right foot in.

I took my right foot out.

I put my right foot in and I waffled all about …

While my Beloved kayaked up and down the shoreline offering encouragement and loving threats of death and dismemberment, I
contemplated my body, which is large and awkward and stiff and slow-moving, and those various qualities of water I have long
loved … it’s fast, it’s slippery, it’s wet …

In a mere thirty-five minutes I had tucked my ample behind into my kayak and was paddling in firm circles around the pond.

After a little more direction and encouragement from my Beloved I began pursuing straight lines across the pond—and we were
off.

The Hoffman Pond, which we had chosen for our maiden voyage, is, in many places, about a foot deep. It is gently lined with
lily pads and staunchly guarded by a small flock of killer swans and a hundred or so Canada geese. I was paddling peacefully
through the lily pads, doing my best to avoid the swans, when the bottom of the pond exploded against my hull and nearly plunged
me into the drink.

Ever alert to my most subtle mood, my Beloved called, “What are you screaming about now?”